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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Slave To Fashion Disposable Workers Sweatshops Bring Third World Horrors To U.S. Cities

Fred Kaplan Boston Globe

Bertha Morales, 25, has worked at seven garment factories in the last seven years. She changes jobs so often because, at all these places, the boss keeps a worker’s first week or two of wages as a “deposit.” When Morales needs to pay some bills, she quits so she can finally get her money. Even then, some bosses don’t hand over what they owe.

The bosses don’t mind the rapid turnover. A contented labor force is not their goal. A peek inside the factories tells a common story: dingy, decrepit workrooms, usually with no windows and only a fan or two; sharp tools and reams of fabric, strewn or clumped on the floor; fire escapes blocked by boxes or trash.

Morales comes from Ecuador, but all of the factories where she worked are in the Garment District of midtown Manhattan.

“Sweatshops” is not a word associated with U.S. labor conditions in the last 75 years, but they have made a comeback in the last few years.

“These are the kinds of conditions we haven’t seen since the turn of the century,” said Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in a telephone interview about the sweatshops he has looked at lately.

Religious leaders are starting to speak out against improper working conditions. It was pressure from churches and synagogues that galvanized The Gap to station independent monitors at its sweatshops in Asia.

“Unless we find a way to show respect for the worker as worker, then I think the whole system is going to go,” warned Roman Catholic Cardinal Cardinal Bernard Law recently.

The spotlight on this seamy side of the U.S. garment industry flicked on when union activists disclosed that Wal-Mart’s line of Kathie Lee Gifford clothing was cut and sewn by impoverished teenagers in Central America.

The klieg lights grew hotter when “Kathie Lee” apparel was found in a shop called Seo Sewing on West 38th Street, two miles from where she broadcasts her morning television talk show with Regis Philbin.

Gifford tried to defuse the controversy by sending her husband, Frank, to Seo to hand out $100 bills to the factory workers. She has since become a spokeswoman for the anti-sweatshop cause.

Every major label

However, the tale hardly begins or ends with Seo and Wal-Mart. Ginny Coughlin, an organizer for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, has recruited several workers, from dozens of these factories, to bring in labels from the clothes they sew, so she can see which companies, knowingly or not, rely on sweatshop labor.

“We get every major label in here,” Coughlin said. Even something like Ralph Lauren? “Not their high-end clothes,” she replied, “but their budget lines, yes.”

The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that at least 2,000 of New York City’s 6,000 garment factories are sweatshops - defined as apparel-makers that systematically violate labor laws.

New York Gov. George Pataki recently signed a bill permitting the state to confiscate merchandise made in sweatshops. However, a similar law has been in place on the federal books for several years, to little effect.

With only 800 inspectors nationwide to cover the 110 million workers in all areas of U.S. industry, the Labor Department can hardly keep an eye on the situation. According to Reich and several workers and union leaders, sweatshop owners commonly keep two sets of books, coerce their workers to lie when asked about wages, and, if all else fails, can easily clear out their shops and flee.

All the shops where Morales has worked break the law in similar ways: no Social Security, no pay for overtime, confiscation of wages and a myriad of unsafe and unsanitary conditions.

Morales’ current employer, on West 37th Street, at least pays the minimum wage, $4.25 an hour and is near an increase. Some of her friends, who work on Eighth Avenue, make half that. “And if they miss one day,” she said, “they’re docked $40 in wages.”

Few, if any shops here resemble the garment factory in El Monte, Calif., where, in a government raid last August, 72 workers were found toiling in what Reich called “slave labor” for 17 hours a day at 60 cents an hour. The owners are now in jail.

However, sweatshops in New York’s Chinatown come close to these conditions. Peter Kwong, director of Asian-American Studies at Hunter College and the maker of a documentary about these shops, said, “All their workers are illegal immigrants from China. Someone has paid $20,000 or more to get them over here, and there’s a lot of pressure on them to pay off the debt.”

Most of them work 12 to 14 hours a day at the factory, then a few hours more at home, for $2 to $3 an hour.

The Chinatown sweatshops are also among the few here that employ children. “Especially when school is out, they bring their kids, some 8 to 10 years old, into the factory,” Kwong said.

Fueled by immigration

New York sweatshop workers always have been new immigrants - Italians and Jews at the turn of the century, Hispanics and Chinese today. Almost all the shops now are owned by new immigrants, too. Koreans hire Hispanics; Chinese hire Chinese. Most of the workers speak little or no English, know nothing about U.S. labor laws, and - since conditions back home were often worse - tend not to complain.

“Sweatshops are fueled by immigration,” said Robert Fitch, an urban historian at New York University.

From the 1880s to the 1920s, the sweatshops were filled by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. These shops vanished in the 1920s, partly because of reforms passed after the fire at the Triangle Shirt factory in 1911, which killed 146 workers trapped inside.

However, the main reason for the disappearance of the sweatshops was the tightening of immigration laws. The trend was reinforced by the growth of labor unions, but “workers were able to unionize because of the lack of new immigrants,” Fitch said.

“The fact that wages could go up so high indicates that sweatshops had essentially come to an end.”

By the 1950s, there were 275,000 garment workers in New York City, earning about the same as auto workers. Today, there are 70,000, most of whom are lucky to make the minimum wage.

The return of sweatshops

Three factors brought about this decline and, with it, the return of the sweatshops.

First, as a global economy evolved, industries utilizing small capital and low-skilled labor - the definition of mass-market garment production - were lured to the low-wage work forces of Asia and Latin America. As a result, to stay in business, U.S. sewing shops had to lower prices, which meant lowering labor costs. Even Coughlin admitted: “For there to be a garment industry in the United States, there have to be sweatshops.”

Second, the retail clothing market became increasingly dominated by huge chain stores, whose lower prices drove mom-and-pop stores out of business. The chains dominate not only sales but production.

One Garment District manufacturer, Guy Epstein of Third Generation Inc., said: “It used to be most manufacturers would have their own factories and maybe it cost them $3 to produce a garment because they wanted to play by the rules. But then the retailer found he can go out into the infrastructure of labor and get the price down to $2.50 or $2 - and a lot of the legitimate manufacturers gave up. They sent the order to a contractor, who could get the price down because he didn’t play by the rules. The moral fiber broke down and it became a free-for-all.”

Finally, there were new waves of immigration - from Asia in the late 1960s, Central and South America in the 1970s - that supplied human fodder for the sweatshop cash cow.

In some cases, Reich noted, it seems hard to believe manufacturers or retailers don’t know what is going on. After raiding the El Monte factory, the Labor Department traced its invoices. “They went straight to some of the biggest retailers,” Reich said.

In most cases, though, the shops are contractors, a situation that lets the manufacturer and retailer claim ignorance of labor practices. The campaign against Gifford and Wal-Mart - started by Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee - was designed to make people aware of the connection.

Reich has started a campaign, too. “We’re naming names,” he said, pressuring stores that carry sweatshop products, praising those that don’t. “The industry has a responsibility. If they don’t know who they’re dealing with, they can find out. It’s a classic case of an industry that has the capacity to clean up its own act. We’ll see if they have the will.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ABOUT THIS SERIES Today: Sweatshops are making a comeback in the U.S. Monday: American disdain for Third World sweatshops threatens future trade agreements. Tuesday: Sweatshop employees in Honduras see their line of work as the surest road to a better life.

This sidebar appeared with the story: ABOUT THIS SERIES Today: Sweatshops are making a comeback in the U.S. Monday: American disdain for Third World sweatshops threatens future trade agreements. Tuesday: Sweatshop employees in Honduras see their line of work as the surest road to a better life.